First Things

1

They carved a strip of flesh from the roof of my mouth and stitched it to my gums. Never go to a periodontist.

Before they started, I asked if they could knock me out. Please, just take me offline so I won’t be around for this. But they didn’t have the equipment for anesthesia. Instead, they offered me a buffet of delightful drugs. Valium perhaps? Or would I prefer a nitrous drip and some Percocet? But I didn’t want to mess with twelve years of hard-earned sobriety, so we agreed I would raise my left hand during the procedure if I needed drugs. Then they covered my eyes with a towel. “So you don’t see all the blood.” As they rooted through my mouth with a scalpel and thread, my right hand remained clamped around my left like it was strangling an unpredictable animal.

So I’ve been thinking about pain over the holidays.

2

Pain has color and shape. Sometimes it’s a purple-grey oval throb. It can be a sharp triangle coated in the red heat and muck of the body. And sometimes it’s just pale blue vapor without an identifiable center.

In my mouth, the pain was animal and alive, shapeshifting and uncovering new ways to torment as if it were possessed with its own wicked intelligence. Pain in the mouth is a particularly hellacious creature, a reminder that, in many ways, I live in my mouth, so accustomed to the contours of this cavern for sustenance and speech that it feels like my soul lives beneath my tongue.

More than ever, I was haunted by the idea that “God is all mouth.” To my mind, this phrase is pure cosmic body horror, but for Madame Guyon, a 17th-century mystic, it articulates the need for complete surrender and passive reception—a radical shift in which God consumes one’s voice and annihilates the self to become a vessel for divine speech.

Anyway, I was not supposed to speak. I had never appreciated how crucial the tongue and the roof of the mouth are for formulating sound. Although talking was an agony, I couldn’t help myself. “Covering your mouth with your hand when you talk doesn’t count,” C. reminded me. So I remained unusually quiet for six days. And I was consistently surprised by how often I was frustrated by my inability to share some goofy opinion or pointless remark only to discover a moment later I’d forgotten it.

I never realized I was such a chatterbox.

3

Must pain be the driver of self-awareness and change? Tales of mental upheavals and revelations tend to unfold in hospital beds, jail cells, and the lonesome hour of the wolf.

The beginning of a new year might be the only time an impulse to improve oneself is collectively determined by an ambivalent calendar rather than some urgent personal need.

My resolutions for 2026 are the usual fiddling with the volume of existing habits: read more, less television, longer runs, more cooking, less complaining, etc. But most of all, I intend to follow the advice of this fortune cookie and avoid making things worse—starting with leaving the stitches in my mouth alone.

4

Meanwhile, C. gave me the most wondrous gift I’ve ever received: a custom-made plaster replica of the Fragmented Head of Colossal Boy (Hellenistic Greek, 2nd century BCE). Over the past few years, this figure has become my avatar (and made a cameo in this newsletter) because I think it perfectly expresses the psychic shred of living in the 21st century. Now it lives on my desk.

5

Speaking of C., we discovered a great deal of controversy within a narrow channel of sound. She asked for an early morning mix to start her day, which led to hours of heated debate about how a person should wake up. “The first thing I want to hear is astronaut music,” she said. She believes a morning playlist should start off cosmic then gradually return the listener to earth, whereas I prefer a churchy hush as I rub the sleep from my eyes and pad into the kitchen to make coffee, a soundtrack that begins as a hum and slowly unfolds into something widescreen and vivid. This is the route I've selected tonight because C. can start her own Morning Radio newsletter for psychonauts who need a safe reentry.

Regardless of their order, these three songs possess the spiritualized energy I fantasize about cultivating in the first minutes of a new year. Then the actual year starts happening. But playing this mix each morning should keep the dream alive.

Kali Malone - Spectacle of Ritual
The Sacrificial Code | Ideal Recordings, 2019 | Bandcamp
Abul Mogard - Desires Are Reminiscences By Now
The Sky Had Vanished | Ecstatic, 2015 | Bandcamp
Autechre - VLetrmx21 (65% slower)
Garbage | Warp, 1995 | Bandcamp